The Curator's Suitcase

With Tara Al-Dughaither, Aouefa Amoussouvi, Jade Barget, Maria Cynkier, Giuliana Kiersz, Shaunak Mahbubani, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Nirlyn Seijas

The Curator’s Suitcase takes the suitcase – real or metaphorical – to discuss international collaboration, planetary networks, and the baggage we carry from project to project as curators. To ponder the curator’s suitcase is to ponder the possibilities and predicaments of curatorial work itself. Some suitcases are real: the suitcases brought to transformative collaborations or the suitcases carried into exile. Others are metaphorical: the baggage of the extractivist, racist, patriarchal and classist world we wish we could leave behind.
Those who have followed the Young Curators Academy during the Berliner Herbstsalon are familiar with our expansive definition of the curator. This curator is the intersectional activator of his/her/their communities, at once writer, artist, scientist, historian, and producer, working at the crossing of art and activism. The seven curators featured in this program all fall into this expansive definition. Over the course of three weeks, they will unpack their own strategies of resistance and share the contexts of their work. Visitors are welcome to join lectures, performances, workshops, screenings, games and conversations.

To the programme

Artistic Director Keng Sen Ong Curational Collaboration Anne Diestelkamp Production Management Lucia Leyser Design Foyer Alissa Kolbusch, Pia Grüter, Mila Mazic Props Pia Grüter Props Assistance Alice Faucher, Marco Michelle, Una Jankov

Keng Sen Ong about The Curator's Suitcase in the current Gorki season brochure:

In the early days of my practice as a performance director, I would often fill my suitcase with photographs, dossiers, and DVDs – a compilation of materials I could show to introduce my work to future collaborators and international venues. One day my mother told me I was a traveling salesman. And I was traveling from city to city to »sell« my work. I thought of Arthur Miller’s traveling salesman in Death Of A Salesman. Willy Loman carried a suitcase of dreams. He was a cog in capitalism’s wheel, struggled with the spiritual and economic bankruptcy surrounding him, and lost.
To ponder the curator’s suitcase is to ponder the possibilities and predicaments of curatorial work itself. Some suitcases are real: the suitcases brought to transformative collaborations or the suitcases carried into exile. Others are metaphorical: the baggage of the extractivist, racist, patriarchal and classist world we wish we could leave behind. The Curator’s Suitcase takes the suitcase – real or metaphorical – to discuss international collaboration, planetary networks, and the baggage we carry from project to project as curators. A series of performative and participatory events will be the frame for seven curators to unpack their own strategies of resistance and share the contexts of their work. Visitors are welcome to join lectures, performances, workshops, screenings, games and conversations. The Curator’s Suitcase will thus illuminate both the situatedness and the radical possibilities of different curatorial practices.
The publics who have followed the Young Curators Academy during the Berliner Herbstsalon are familiar with our expansive definition of the curator. This curator is the intersectional activator of his/her/their communities, at once writer, artist, scientist, historian, and producer working at the crossing of art and activism. The curators featured in this program all fall into this expansive definition. The program will encompass re-activations of Latin American feminist performance acts of resistance (Nirlyn Seijas, Salvador, Brazil); presentations of archival research into women’s songs in Saudi Arabia (Tara Al Dughaither, Jeddah); gaming sessions on planetary consciousness and interspecies entanglement (Maria Cynkier, Northampton, UK); the politics of listening to everyday micro-histories (Aouefa Amoussouvi, Berlin); solidarity in the queer politics of India (Shaunak Mahbubani, New Delhi); embodied writing workshops (Giuliana Kiersz, Berlin); reflections on personal, historical, and cosmological territories as actions to relate to the world, inspired by Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Berlin).

The Curator’s Suitcase is part of the Young Curators Academy of the 5. Berliner Herbstsalon. Funded by the State of Berlin, Senate Department for Culture and Europe.